WEST CHESTER -- Morgan Marie Mengel, the West Goshen woman accused of engineering the death of her husband at the hands of her young lover, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder charges Tuesday as testimony in her trial was on the verge of beginning.

Mengel, 37, formerly of Pottstown, was sentenced to life in state prison without parole, plus a consecutive sentence of 20 years probation for conspiring with Stephen Shappell, a man she worked with in the landscaping company she ran with her husband, 33-year-old Kevin Mengel Jr., to kill him.

After her formal sentencing, Chester County Chief Deputy District Attorney Patrick Carmody, who led the prosecution against Mengel along with Assistant District Attorney Deborah Ryan, disputed the notion that the case was one of a love triangle gone bad. “Morgan Mengel only loved herself,” he said after the hearing before Chester County Senior Judge Thomas Gavin, who one year ago had declared a mistrial in the case.

“This was the ultimate crime of selfishness,” Carmody told reporters outside Gavin’s courtroom, after watching members of Kevin’s Mengel’s family hug one another and shed tears of relief in the 7th floor hallway of the Chester County Justice Center. “She washed herself of her husband, of her lover, and of her three children.

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“She tried to make her husband disappear, but because of the love of Kevin’s family and the truly excellent work of the police, it didn’t happen,” Carmody declared.

Kevin Mengel was killed June 17, 2010 by several blows to the head delivered by Shappell, who has pleaded guilty in the case and is due to be sentenced later this winter to a term of 40-to-80 years behind bars, at the family’s MKB Landscaping Co. shop on West Chester Pike in West Goshen. The body was hidden in a garage bay there, and later brought to a shallow grave near the Marple-Newtown High School in Delaware County, where Shappell, then 21, had attended school.

West Goshen police were able to arrest Shappell and Morgan Mengel several days later after discovering text messages sent between the two before, during, and after Shappell committed the crime.

“Just waiting for him to bend over I have shovel in my hand ha-ha,” Shappell wrote to Morgan Mengel about 10:30 a.m. on June 17, 2010, according to evidence in the case. “U backin out?” she responded. “It’s done get up here now,” Shappell wrote.

“Seriously?” she asked. “Dead serious,” he said.

In a statement to the court read by Morgan Mengel’s defense attorney, Jack McMahon of Philadelphia, she attempted to atone for her crime.

“How does anyone say they are sorry to three children for the loss of their father?” Morgan Mengel asked, referring to the daughter and two sons she shared with Kevin Mengel, and who now live with their grandparents.“How am I supposed to make it better for two families?” hers and her husband’s, who had been devastated by the murder.

“There is only one way I can, by taking responsibility today,” McMahon read from the yellow legal paper on which Morgan Mengel wrote her statement. “I am sorry for so many things. I am hoping that by being held accountable for my actions, we are all able to move forward to some sort of healing.”

Morgan Mengel’s words, however, failed to convince her husband’s family that she was truly sorry for what she had engineered. “There is no remorse here,” said Kevin Mengel’s mother, Kathleen Barton, after the hearing concluded.

The defendant, a small 37-year-old woman with dark brown hair pulled back from her head in a ponytail and dressed in a black pants suit with white blouse, entered guilty pleas for first degree murder, possession of instruments of crime, hindering apprehension, and criminal conspiracy. The murder charge carries with it a mandatory sentence of life in prison without parole.

Although Carmody had asked Gavin, as sentencing judge, to add a term of 20-to-40 years in prison to the end of her mandatory life term, the judge declined, saying that he thought such sentences irrational. There is almost no chance that Morgan Mengel will ever be released from prison, he said.

In emotional statements to Gavin, Kevin Mengel’s family let loose the anger, resentment, and sorrow that had been largely hidden from public view until now.

“How dare you deprive my son Kevin of his God-given right to live his life and his right to die a natural death?” said Kevin Mengel Sr., who after some years of conflict with his son had reached a happy rapprochement the spring before the murder. “How dare you force us to accept the horrendous burden of having to bury our child before ourselves?

“Today, you will receive the maximum justice that our laws allow for taking my son Kevin’s life,” his statement continued. “But my faith tells me and I am comforted in knowing that the real justice for what you have done will come in the afterlife. May you rot in hell for eternity.”

The plea came somewhat unexpectedly, as the two sides had chosen a jury Monday of eight women and four men to begin hearing the case Tuesday. The panel was in a sideroom waiting while the guilty plea hearing was conducted.

McMahon, leaving the courtroom, said that the decision came last week.

“The decision to plead guilty was her idea, and came a couple of days ago,” he said. “I think there was a desire to put some closure on it, for everybody – the kids, the Mengel family, and for Morgan herself.”